photo credit: squacco

“If you want to, you can let go of any feelings of resentment, of regret, of anger. You can accept that you are a fabulous human being because of all the bad things that have happened to you, not in spite of them.” -Richard Templar

Get Unstuck

Staying stuck in the past limits you to the boundaries of the past. The labels, personality, influences, abuses, habits, enabling, or hurtful effects of the past will keep extended control into the present as long as you hold on to them.

But I don’t want to hold on to them, you’re thinking. I just can’t get rid of them. They’re part of who I am.

You choose your inheritance:

by which I mean this:

You can’t choose what they give, but you can choose what you take.

Maybe those past events are part of who you are; but they don’t have to be a negative part of who you are. Whatever lesson or legacy you carry away from the past depends on how you choose to reference the past.

Be Bound Only by Choice

The emotional or mental trauma you might have endured isn’t time-bound, it’s choice-bound. You can continue being as much a victim today as you were when the trauma-inducing event happened. Or you can separate yourself.

You can step forward. You can accept, first, that the past happened. It did. You don’t have a perfect past. You can’t change that. It sucks; that’s life.

Set Your Own Frame of Reference

Then you can choose to reference the past as 1) OVER and 2) something you have chosen to derive value from, however impossible that may seem at first glance.

But once I accepted that what was done was done, and that I could choose to forgive and get on with life, things improved enormously. -Templar

What’s in your past that’s hanging on to you? Maybe it’s something so horrible you can’t see how there can be any value.

• Maybe you were raped. Molested. Abused.
• Maybe you were abandoned.
• Maybe you abandoned someone else.
• Maybe you were betrayed, or you chose to betray.
• Maybe you broke a heart. Maybe your heart was broken.
• Maybe you lost everyone you loved.
• Maybe you were a victim of daily degradation, scorn, taunting, ridicule.
• Maybe you committed a crime.
• Maybe you got into financial ruin.
• Maybe you ruined your reputation. Maybe someone else did.
• Maybe you were just mean, or lazy, or careless, and the smallness of your past makes you think it doesn’t matter, but you can’t let go.

Maybe maybe maybe: I’m not saying that what happened in the past isn’t bad.
I am saying that no matter how bad it was (or how small it was), you can still get value from it. That can be your take-away.

Pack Your Own Take-Away Box

Don’t believe me?
Here’s a challenge: No matter what the past was for you, you can learn the lesson of forgiveness from it.

If you were wronged, no matter how deeply, you can learn to forgive.

If you were the one who did the wrong, no matter how heinous, you can learn to seek forgiveness. You can learn to receive forgiveness. And you can learn to forgive yourself. (By the way, no one benefits from your refusal to forgive yourself.)

Recognize Your Own Ability

Moving forward means moving away from the circumstances, identities, and experiences of your past. It means you take what you want with you, but you don’t stagnate. You accept that there is a reality back there behind you, but it doesn’t have to be your reality now or your reality in the future.

One thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal. – St. Paul

Recognize the ability you have to limit or extend your past. It’s up to you.

Make Your Own Choices Over the Past

You can choose:

• stay in the same cycles of behavior, or get help and break out
• repeat the same thought patterns, or think new thoughts
• believe what you’ve always heard, or start asking questions and seeking the real answers
• accept the identity you wear from the past, or take it off and define yourself in the present
• repeat the past blindly, or recognize the past when it appears in your present, and limit it as you decide
• frame yourself as a victim, or see both the negative and positive influences in the past and carry the positive with you
• keep looking back over your shoulder, or picture clearly the person you want to be in your future
• believe in what’s over (no one can control the past) or believe in what you can do about the future
• focus on what’s already happened (no one can control the past) or take action to build a life you want to live
• drown in guilt or shame or sorrow (no one can control the past) or forgive and be forgiven (forgiveness is a daily choice)

Your call.

If you accept what’s done is done, you are left with yourself exactly as you are. You can’t go back and change anything, so you’ve got to work with what you’ve got. -Templar

photo credit: piermario

But the “artistic endeavors” are just a single piece of the pie that is creativity.

Creativity is less about what you do and more about how you do it.

1. Limit the information being shoved at your brain in tiny bits and pieces.

start spending less time with those tidbits.

“Creativity is the ability to connect disparate ideas in new and useful ways,” says Sara C. Mednick, PhD, assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego in this article.

If your brain is only willing to munch on one tidbit at a time,

2. Find time for bigger stories.

3. Hang out with creative people

4. Expand your idea of what creativity is.

5. Be more silly, unafraid, juvenile, child-like.

6. Reject the first five ideas/solutions/answers you come up with for any given need/problem/question.

7. Give yourself limits:

• a $50/week grocery budget [money limit]
• 15 minutes to cook dinner [time limit]
• use your non-dominant hand to write or draw [ability limit]
• find a decent outfit at the thrift store [resource limit]

8. Get around different cultures, different people, different ways of life.

We get to boxed into our own version of normal, and when that’s all we see, we forget that normal is an arbitrary thing, defined differently by different people in different places and different times. Even in the same place and time, you can find all sorts of differences of normal when you venture into different subcultures. Are you a Christian? Hang out with some atheists. Are you from the city? Spend a weekend with a family of farmers; it’s a whole new normal. From the North? Go down South.

9. Fire your critic.

10. Get into unfamiliar, uncomfortable, strange, new, unnerving situations.

But overall, regardless of children’s age or marital status, women reported both more guilt and distress over work intrusions into the home. - USAToday

Women in both the adolescent age group and the 25-33 age group reported a higher level of expected guilt than the men. - NY Daily News

There have been studies that show that “problems in interpersonal relationships tend to evoke guilt (interpersonal guilt) and moral dilemmas more often in women.” This is labeled as “interpersonal sensitivity.” -  FYI Living

We know without analyzing further that guilt is counter-productive, a waste of time, an unnecessary burden.

If we really did know that guilt helps no one, wouldn’t we quit allowing it to influence us?

guilt and conviction are not the same thing.

May I pose a suggestion, peoplings of the women variety?

Try it.

“Men of great faith have always called us to wake up to great expectations, and the prudent have always laughed at them and said that these did not belong in reality. But the poet in man knows that reality is a creation, and human reality has to be called forth from its obscure depth by man’s faith which is creative.” -Rabindranath Tagore

Climbing a Mountain is difficult work. You won’t succeed if you’re unfit (disabled by bad habits, bad character, emotional obstacles). You won’t succeed alone. Or without a vision. Or without the necessary skills. Or with the load of a pack mule strapped to your back.

How to Climb (or Not) a Mountain

You’ve got to be

Otherwise you’re doomed and they’ll make one of those movies about your death on the mountain, all terror and snow and avalanche and frostbite. You as a snowball, rolling back down to land in, yep, the ditch. Where, most likely, you’ll decide you should just stay.

You’ll tell yourself you don’t want no stinkin’ Mountain.

You’ll face the other way.You’ll build a little hut in the ditch, and you’ll fill your brain with numbing distractions and comparisons. You’ll pretend to be happy. You’ll try to forget there ever was a Mountain.

“We stand before this great world. The truth of our life depends upon our attitude of mind towards it – an attitude which is formed by our habit of dealing with it…” -Rabindranath Tagore

For me, getting out of the ditch and up the mountain means one thing right now: simplify. Simplify everything. I need to quit trying to be Superwoman (because I’m not) and accept my own limits (because they are real) and live in them wholly, find room for the things that matter and eliminate the things that are only clutter. Life-clutter. Life-sized dust bunnies filling up all the space, sucking out all the energy.

Time to up and murder some dust bunnies ’round here.

(This is all kind of figurative… you get that, right? I mean, I will kill literal dust bunnies as well, but I’m talking about something a little bigger…)

Simplify.

Simplify, simplify, simplify in every way possible. Quit doing what doesn’t really matter. Quit saying yes just because of the instant gratification of having pleased someone by saying yes (at the very real, extended detriment of then being obligated to put my time, energy, effort, space, resources, and very self into fulfilling that Yes).

I have managed to get myself so busy doing stuff, unimportant stuff, detail stuff, good stuff, stuff I voluntarily agreed to do. And all this stuff I do is at my own expense, at the cost of things that are important to me.

NOT anyone else’s fault. (Nobody ever held a gun to my head.)
It’s on me.

“For the simple are killed by their turning away, and the complacency of fools destroys them; but whoever listens to me [Wisdom] will dwell secure and will be at ease, without dread of disaster.” Proverbs 1:32-33

Photos by Kevin Dooley,   Jesse Hull, yacht_boy, and coda.

For the new year, my resolution is simple:

Quit. Quit a lot of things that don’t matter.

I’m dropping more and more. I’m cleaning out the house. I’m letting go of obligations. I’m saying no. I’m not taking on any new writing jobs. The money is always great to have, but I’m out of time. Which is more important?

Time.

The word for me in 2011 is to simplify, cut back, cut down, cut out, reduce reduce reduce. No adding until I am working, moving, progressing daily toward the (deepest) goals I have as a wife, mom, writer, worshiper. More room for the real, the deep, the creative. More cutting out of the superfluous, the busy work, the obligations.

I always think the key is Discipline, and that’s part of it I know. But there are other elements too, elements that drive discipline forward.

Things like Desire. Dreams. Doing.

Be a DOER. Less talking, excusing, imagining, procrastinating, fearing, wishing, distracting myself. More do. Sit and write. Stand and work. Be a doer.

Those words – how I need those words. How I need a row of sketchbooks and a jar of the best pens. How I am rapidly rabidly rambunctiously going to declutter this house and my life. How I am realizing that I am not naturally good at things I thought I could easily conquer. That’s okay; it’s kind of a relief to know I have to work at it. Like, hey, that would explain why I have to work at this so much…

So much dead weight.

So much stuff – tangible and intangible – that I carry around each day. It weighs me down, slows me down, drags me down and makes even the things I love to do difficult, slow, painful, irritating, hurtful, unpleasant, unlovely.
Enough of that mess. (Say that emphatically.)

But all that dead weight – that’s why I become so deeply confused, so uncertain about who I am, what I love, where I’m going, why I’m breathing, what my purpose is in this life. Sometimes it’s just a big painful unpleasant business, trudging through life.

That’s what life becomes with so much dead weight: a trudge, a crawl in stinking, hostile, dry rocky thorny places, another fall into the ditch and…

I lay there.

I stay there, wondering why I’m trying to gather up the strength to crawl back out again. Easier to just lay there. Less painful to still myself in the muddy water, accept this place, surrender. Give up. Sleep in and crawl wearily out of bed at the last minute. Quit training, disciplining, trying – just threaten, repeat, ignore, complain. Don’t write. Get mad, blame people, and feel victimized by circumstances. Live in the ditch.

My ditch may be better, nicer, cleaner than someone else’s – no drugs or abuse or adultery here – but it’s still a ditch.

I am meant to live on the mountain.

But the way is, well, up a mountain. My hands and feet and knees ache, bleed on the climb. I forget: why am I climbing? Where am I going? What am I doing here?
The dead weight I carry is too much. I’ve no energy lefty for the climb, no strength to hold on, no mind or time for the vision, to way to renew it, see it, grab onto it, and remind myself why, where, what.

This is the point of life: don’t stay in the ditch.

Photos by Atli Haroarson.

1. Stop talking all the time.

Really. We are obsessed with talking about everything: meetings, marriage counseling, phone calls, texting, discussions, emails, chatting, family counsels, therapy.
Some of that’s great, some of it is needed, but 87% of the time, the solution is not talk but action. You only need that 13% of talk time to figure out what action to take. From there, talking is just that much more procrastination. [Yes, I made up the 87%. Seems like a good number though.]

2. Stop updating your online life every 20 seconds.

You’re distracted, and you’re creating a false sense of connection, community, and productivity, and it’s adding to the clutter in your life without adding any real value.
Update maybe 3 or 5 times a day (if that) and then spend time in the real world creating real connections, adding to a real community, and doing some things that are really productive. Like maybe counting the times I used the word “really” in that sentence.

3. Stop with the pointless comparison.

In what areas of life do you find yourself continually tripping up, falling, failing? Proverbs tells us that the fear of man brings a snare, and asks “Wrath is cruel, and anger is outrageous; but who is able to stand before envy?” [Proverbs 27:4].
Those areas where you keep tripping and falling? Look for snare: the fear of man setting a standard that isn’t right for you. And look for envy, which is guaranteed to make you fall. You can’t stand in the face of it, so get it out of your heart.

4. Stop using your culture and your peer group as your only reference point.

Number #3 will be directly effected for the better. Get a new, bigger frame of reference. Study history. Read about different cultures. Read the Bible. Expand.

5. Stop feeling sorry for people.

Yourself, especially. Pity helps no one. It reinforces the self-defeating cycle of victimization. It enables addictions, narcissism, and poverty of the soul.
It justifies laziness, resentment, and fear. It makes you negative. Offer mercy. Have compassion. But in your mercy and compassion, always see and call people (including yourself, especially) to be their best, to live up to what God has made them to be.

6. Stop being snarky.

Sarcasm is not that great. I know, I know, there’s a lot of it here. I’m working on it. Really, I am, because here’s the bottom line: it’s fun to be clever, and witty, and make people laugh. But at the end of the day, sincerity counts for a lot more than snarkiness.
When people need help, they will not turn to the wit of the group, they will turn to the one who will listen and answer sincerely. I want to help people. Do you? Don’t turn them away by putting a witty one-liner at a higher value than someone’s feelings.

7. Stop keeping stuff you don’t need.

Old clothes. Old relationships. Grasp the “seasonal” concept and apply it to everything. Okay, there are limits! Marriage – keep that. Kids – keep them. Parents – hang on. Siblings – keep them too. Some relationships are meant to last a lifetime, but not all relationships are meant to last, and not all relationships can last at the same level.
If you’re a loyal person (I am), it can be extremely difficult to realize this and take action accordingly. However, for the sake of the relationships in your life that do need to last, that do have a level of depth, you need to let go of others.

8. Stop with the feel-good friends.

Find some friends who make you a little nervous, uncomfortable, who ask questions you can’t answer, who know more than you do about God, parenting, child-rearing, who challenge you, who inspire you, who call you to be (what was that we said earlier?) your best, to live up to what God has made you to be. Not convinced? Read Proverbs 27: 5, 6, 9.

9. Stop assuming people don’t like you, don’t get you, or don’t care about you.

Sure, maybe for every 100 people you meet there will be 2 who don’t get you, 1 who doesn’t like you, and 1 who just doesn’t care about you. But the other 96? They get you (on some level); they like you; they care about you (to some degree); and they like you.
All that is needed for more getting, liking, and caring is more time, and more of you getting, liking, and caring about them. So don’t be paranoid. Risk it. People care, they really do. (P.S. I like you.)

10. Stop protecting yourself, your stuff, and your territory.

If you do just one thing from this list, make it this one. You want a better life? Really? Quit trying to control everything. Quit staking your claim in the world. Quit demanding that things go your way. Quit looking out for yourself.
Quit measuring, quit hoarding, quit defending. Open up. Give. Give more than you think you can. Flex. Go with the flow. Do things your husband’s way. Ask your friend for her advice, then take it. Be generous with your whole life.
There is one that scattereth, and yet increaseth; and there is one that withholdeth more than is needed, but ends up in poverty. The liberal soul shall be made prosperous; and he that watereth shall be watered also himself.Proverbs 11:24-25

When Annie approached me about participating in her Modern Homemaking REdefined series as a guest blogger, I was honored and excited, but also a little apprehensive. I loved the concept of finding the commonalities of women nurturing their homes and families in so many different walks of life. But, let’s face it. My lifestyle is pretty “common” as seeking commonalities goes. I’m a mother of three preschoolers who sends her kids to daycare while she goes to work at an office. Judging by the waiting lists on the daycare centers in my neck of the woods, that’s a pretty popular lifestyle choice.
So, as I was formulating thoughts about this essay and my approach to homemaking in 2010, all the same old ideas came to mind. Managing time, prioritizing schedules, getting dinner on the table, balancing work and the needs of children, getting to that 15th preschool party, figuring out what happens when the minivan needs to be serviced, determining exactly how many chicken nuggets can sustain one 5-year-old. Not necessarily ground-breaking and interesting stuff.

About ten minutes later, my boss of 16 years decided it was time to retire and close the advertising agency where I work. Yeah. Life has a way of making it interesting, doesn’t it? Over the course of a weekend, a conversation with the Queen of my current company, and some soul searching, I decided to take a trip down entrepreneur lane and start my own graphic design business. Presto, small business owner and work-at-home-mom all in one fell swoop! Can I have a moment, please?

Work opportunities change. Kids change. Schedules change. Choices change. Grocery prices change. Diapers and pull-ups change (constantly). Life in transition. Now there’s a commonality. As I started rethinking the new tenor of my life as a mom, designer, and homemaker as it crashes into the new title of business owner, this one fact began to rise to the surface. Change happens. It just does. We can resist it, but we can’t stop it. We can bemoan it, but we can’t squelch it. We can fear it, but we can’t insulate ourselves from it.

As I look at my life in the five years I’ve had my precious gifts (5yo, 3.5yo and just shy of 2yo), I see an endlessly flowing river of change. And, I see that each new stage of development and each new endeavor has brought frustration or worry, perhaps, but also joy and growth and the satisfaction of having made it through. I’m realizing that for me, modern homemaking is about embracing that life in transition. It’s about grabbing it and sucking the life from it, no matter how quickly it’s traveling. And come to think of it, the idea really isn’t all that modern. My grandmother did it and my mother did it through the constant changes of their times as well. Changing times and circumstances are certainly nothing new.

As mothers and homekeepers, however, it so often falls to us to make the most of those changes, those transitions that may be unique to our years and our families, but common among us nonetheless. I find myself striving in the midst of this inevitable change to create my own individual core consistencies– those things I want to remain constant about myself, about my home, about the quality of my children’s lives. In practicality, it’s about setting in motion the habits and schedules and even shortcuts that make that consistency possible, and about putting to rest the guilt to conform to some other Mom’s homemaking or parenting core requirements.

So what if Ore Ida or Tyson cuts my chicken and potatoes for me? At least I heard the continuing saga of rocket ships and sharks at the dinner table. So what if my kids find their way to bed some nights with sticky still on their cheeks. At least we found out how funny it is to drop your popsicle, pick it up again and pop it in your mouth, grit and all. So what if crumbs and dust bunnies live well and prosper under the couch? At least we know where all the spare Lincoln Logs and matchbox cars are stored. So what if all the lovely art objects have been relegated to the closet downstairs? At least we witnessed the coffee table tower-building feat of the century right up until the 2yo intervened. These are the core consistencies of what matters and what doesn’t. Nothing brings those constants front and center quite like change.

How will I respond to this new transition? How will it affect my home? My schedule? My ability to take care of my family financially, physically, emotionally? It’s easy to get lost or bogged down in this repeat-play in my mind. But, these are questions we all face–every day and with every shift in a thousand areas of life from jobs to marriages to gas prices to potty training.

For the past two years, I’ve chosen a posting “theme word” for the year that reflects something I want to pursue more carefully in my life. The 2010 theme word I determined back in December was “courage.” How could I have known that the events of this year would so strongly challenge that pursuit? Modern homemaking and homekeeping requires courage, to be sure. Courage in the face of change. Courage to pull from that change all the growing and teaching it has to offer. Courage to demand from that change the ability to keep what is worth keeping and release what isn’t. I hope that I can build from these transitions the courage to really live. To live in my own home, that place I’ve created. With my own benchmarks for success and my own set of constants. I hope we all can.

What do you need courage to let go of? What do you need courage to keep as part of your core?

Today’s 2 Cents Courtesy of:

Haley Mongtomery is a designer by trade, a creative type at heart and a mother in joy. She is the author of EyeJunkie, her personal foray into the art of paying attention — part mommy blog, part spiritual quest, part cultural record and part sarcastic word-play. When she’s not chasing three preschoolers, she’s usually writing sentence fragments or obsessing about life as the newly minted owner of Small Pond Graphics. You can follow her on Twitter: @itsasmallpond or @eyejunkie.